


Poems

by longnoideatime



Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-17
Updated: 2019-05-13
Packaged: 2019-06-28 22:10:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 1,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15716082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/longnoideatime/pseuds/longnoideatime
Summary: Collection of personal poems that have been on my phone forever. Felt the need to share one and the rest sort of followed. Some of them I’ve been writing more recently. Comments welcome.





	1. Poem 1

I write you, because the absence of you is still somehow shaped like your presence. 

I write you because you overwhelm, overwhelmed my defences and now that my house is underwater there is only air that is not you in the top corner of the attic. 

I drift along on the current of you I’ve created, fallen prey to, and wonder if it will ever end.

Or lessen. Abate. 

I could let the air leave my lungs and sink down into you as long as I knew that in the water you were wrapped back around me as I was wrapping myself around you. 

I drown in your tide and pray that your fire begins to burn less brightly, no longer a flashover combustion but something that lingers long and warm and comforting. 

Instead I will macerate away, fasting on air-fulls of you I am convinced are whole meals, and you will fall victim to my incendiary blaze as I go out in nothing akin to glory, and we’ll both stand on opposite sides of a road as we bleed and stare back at each other. 

This will only hurt, but the swell of you I sail forth on, carrying in my veins with every waterlogged step, means I can’t stop. 

I don’t want to.


	2. Draft of a Text

Hey. I miss you. Hope you’re ok. Let me know how you’re doing when you can. 

Hey. Hope you’re ok. I miss you. Let me know how you’re doing when you can. 

Hey. Hope you’re ok. Let me know how you’re doing when you can. I miss you.


	3. If I Hated You

If I hated you like you think I hate you, you’d be dead.

If I hated you as you think your lungs would cease to inflate, your heart would slow, the blood in your veins icing slowly until it stood still. 

If I hated you like you think I hate you, my thoughts would bury you alive, grains of sand tickling against your nose one by one until they came faster and faster still and became an avalanche. 

If I hated you how much you’re telling everyone I do, faceless men would dog you down dark streets, as you looked over your shoulder, as they slowly closed in, as you realised you weren’t paranoid, as sharp metal flashed in a single glint of moonlight, as your life seeped out onto the street, as you died alone. 

If I hated you like you think I hate you, my skin would peel from my body, burnt away by the powerful emotion unable to be contained inside, raw muscles moving and exposed beneath the sun, skeletal sinewy fingers still grasping for you.

If I hated you like you wished I hate you, you’d actually matter to me.


	4. Love: A Haiku

Dumb warm glow, go away  
No one likes always smiling  
Distracted by you


	5. How Much

There is you, there is you, there is you.

Fear and affection for you fighting a war for dominance that seems to bear no chance of being lost. 

Lightness that takes root somewhere along my spine and makes standing easier, more like floating. 

I am wary, shadows in corners, but they are of the future, and you are too full in the present for me to fall off the edge of the world, the swell of your horizon blue and limitless. 

In this moment, this one, this one, this one

I want to dissolve into you, little else close enough when you beat like hope in the winged eaves of my heart, trapped, both trapped. 

I like you so much it sucks.


	6. Grief

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don’t know. I’m not in a good mood with this stuff lately.

I am quiet. Not silent. 

It might be hard to understand the difference, but there is one. 

Believe me, this once. 

I have spoken, I have screamed, begged, prayed, all of it raw and angry and loud, and it has been too unpalatable for digestion. 

Ignored and left behind on plates. 

The suffocation of having words lodged in your throat, words that choke you to swallow, choke you to try to speak, because they are horrible. 

And then they dribble out of your mouth, leaving behind the foul taste of their wretched shapes, and the putrid stench of those horrible words makes heads turn away. 

The words unheard, the wounds unseen. 

Except neither of those are true, because I have spoken them within your hearing, I have shown them beneath your eyes.

So not unseen, not unheard, undigested and ignored for your own rotten convenience. Sometimes worse. Questioned and made less of.

I burn brighter than any pit in hell; rage hotter than 5,779 K searing me from the inside out. 

The fire could peel me apart, my skin clawing away beneath my fingernails to expose the flames that would set all before me ablaze, the flames that are hidden beneath my bones.

And wouldn’t it be fair? For consequences to finally exist?

I am no longer the same, irrevocably different from that girl who might once have existed. 

I am hate, and anger, sometimes only this red burning fury, no more. Red that crashes down upon me in unending waves that erode me further each time. 

I swish it around in my mouth, considering the taste: defeat. Injustice I must make peace with, rather than repay. Because I can’t. How? 

I spoke. You didn’t listen. You didn’t believe.


	7. Less Than A Haiku

“Wait! Don’t go—“   
I do, though.   
I leave.


	8. The Internal Inconsistencies of Rubber (Again)

I think it’s over. I think I’ve moved on. But then somehow it washes up,

on my shores again. I call you in a rage —

Again, again

— explain to me again how it wasn’t abuse. Tell me just one more time,

how I’ve misconstrued. How my goddamn memory fails, so conveniently for you. 

Again, again

You’re rubber and I am blue. Everything I accuse,

has always bounced off of you.


	9. Clasped

“Please let go of my hand.”  
That’s what I say to you.  
“Please let me slide into the blue, let my head sink beneath the waves, let me drown, let me rage and scream and break myself and dissolve into so much nothing that I can never be recovered again, and Godwhycan’tyoujustfuckingletgoofmyfuckinghand—“  
But I’m the one holding onto you.


	10. Home

I have moved in on your front lawn and called it home. 

You let me stay, climb in my tent, and spend nights in my arms, the world outside muted by the glow of where our skin touches. 

I don’t need anything from you, capable of standing on my own two feet, carving out my own curve of the world, but I want you, hope for you, long for you, crave for you, think of you. 

You need someone to stand, balanced and still, a beam holding up your house. But me, the individual?

Your want seems so much less than mine, but then Anhedonia holds you too close. You don’t want anything, not even yourself. 

If I could pry her fingers loose, if I could fight your war, but I’m incapable, can only stand outside offering what I am to you. 

My feet bleed from walking barefoot down your road, and I know that even if you decide to love me, so much worse is yet to come. But I can’t turn away, when you feel just like—


	11. Forgetting

You are  
          _so nice_  
   To listen to me without judgment.   
To accept the words I feed you when you ask.   
                             You want my stories.   
You ask for the bright ones, but there are none  
                     Left.   
So I give you  
           dark ones instead. 

And those you swallow down  
        with your  
drinks  
        in the fitting darkness of night.   
You let them dissolve away, amortised with the alcohol in your blood,  
Forgotten in the morning,  
And I wonder  
                      what it’s like  
To love someone who  
                Doesn’t   
             Truly  
          Know  
       You.


	12. Call Me Your Baby

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So not a poem, but a song. Feels self-aggrandising and hokey to post a singing link on a writing website, but here it is anyway: https://soundcloud.com/longnoideatime/call-me-your-baby

The word you used is common and cheap  
Still it means so stupid much to me  
Call me your baby  
Say it again  
I’ll let you own me, even if it’s pretend  
I cannot claim you, you’re beyond my reach  
But I want to, so desperately

Call me your baby  
Say it again  
Tell me not to leave you, the answer’s a given  
I would hold you everyday, you’re the one who I want to stay  
Who I want to stay  
Who I want to stay  
Who I want to stay


	13. Violence

_**Invidious** , **invective** , **violent** , _and _**vicious**_

I say that I understand,

but you ignore me when I feel like flaying myself,

and I want to dig my teeth beneath your skin and expose the red threaded muscle beneath,

energy _**screaming**_ against the sides of my brain.


	14. Relapse

Vices, circling tighter.

I have slid back into them like a hand into a dish glove,

Only to find lingering soapy water in the fingers.

They don’t do what I want them to do,

Don’t relieve my misery as I had hoped.

And I burn burn burn like a circle of hell,

While trapped in my own ring of fire.

I think about you.

But that’s not enough either.

What is?

The chains get a better hold of me.

I take a deep breath

and let myself be pulled under.


	15. Stay

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If anyone is uncomfortable with the indirect mention of suicidality, here’s your trigger warning.

I love you.  
I love you.

Even when it cools, it pulls at my legs and tries to drag me down into you.  
Even when I am too much myself, I want to be with you. 

How do you know I’d be ok without you?  
How do you know the world will keep turning?

Maybe everything will stop, maybe that moment, the one you disappeared into, will forever define the rest of the universe and nothing will ever be the same for anyone ever again.  
Maybe my heart will break and not heal, and I’ll walk around with a still-beating wound lying open in my chest, raw to the world.

What will I do without you here to hold me in place?  
What will I do with the tenderness I feel for you leaking out of me onto the floor?

Why leave me here when I need you, give me the phantom limb of your presence, something I always reach for but can no longer find, slipping through my fingers and every time bringing renewing despair?  
Why would you rob the world, make it emptier?

I know that you warned me not to get attached.  
I know that everything that would hurt about losing you would eventually close over.

I don’t want it to though, don’t want any of it.  
I don’t want to lose you, don’t want to get accustomed to your absence, don’t want anything to happen to you but that you stay with me.

Stay with me.  
Don’t go.


	16. Anymore

She is drowning slowly  
So far away beneath the water  
Refractory, she’s a distortion of what she used to be  
And you want her back  
There where your hands could control her  
But she is underwater  
It’s in her ears and her eyes  
She can’t be your girl anymore  
She can’t even be her own  
Oceans in her lungs and she can’t speak  
It is easier beneath the waves  
Even with the light fading away  
Hard to read depth from surface  
She is sinking slowly  
You are on the shore  



End file.
